The UNICEF Innovation Ventures team in currently has six internship positions available for Summer 2017. Please see below for details on the types of positions and how to apply.

Do you want to use your skills to find new technology solutions to improve children’s lives? Want to learn more about how big data can be used for good? Want to be part of the team setting up the first venture fund inside the UN? Do you have a passion for finding and testing new ideas?

The UNICEF Ventures Internship Programme (VIP) offers eligible/qualified students the opportunity to acquire direct practical experience with dedicated support of the team. This internshipis for the purpose of developing your skills and contributing to an exciting project being piloted by UNICEF Ventures.

As a UNICEF Innovation Ventures (VIP) you will:

Get to work on a specific project of strategic value to the team. You’ll get to present your ideas and outputs to the team at the end of the summer.

Receive dedicated mentorship from a member of multidisciplinary team related to your project and your career and development plans

Be part of a dedicated induction programme to UNICEF and UNICEF Innovation

Visit 2-3 external partners based in New York City that are active in the space of technology and innovation

Purpose of the assignment: This internship is remotely based and may require travel to Lahore, Pakistan, to provide support to the Rah-e-maa team, Innovations for Poverty Alleviation Lab at the Information Technology University. Rah-e-maa received seed funding from the UNICEF Innovation Fund in November to support development and piloting of their IVR system to provide life-saving information to low-literate communities in Pakistan. Rah-e-maa is seeking an intern to support the Rah-e-maa develop its business model through market research, partnership, and business development skills.

Main tasks:

Conduct market research to determine possible clients for the helpline technology

Develop business plan to acquire customers and bring project to sustainability following the research and development stage

Develop partnership strategy to support scale-up and growth stage of the platform

Document the development and piloting process and support development of future sales/marketing materials

Purpose of the assignment: We are seeking an intern to support our growing drone work (http://unicefstories.org/drones/), including the global strategy, drone corridor in Malawi and other upcoming country-level pilots.

Main tasks:

Desk and literature research on existing drone initiatives and potential corporate and academic partners for the drone corridor in Malawi

Identify and map start-ups and their projects to develop pipeline for the Innovation Fund

Support development of communications assets around UNICEF’s drone work, including blogs, documentation of successes and case studies, pitch deck for the corridor

Duration: 10 weeksDuty Station: NYHQRead the full TOR and apply here.Purpose of the assignment: What is your Kb/day?How many kilobytes of information does a child need to be informationally healthy? What type of kilobytes are most useful? Is a “Kardashian kilobyte” of less “nutritive value” than a “Wikipedia kilobyte”? How can we optimize the information access of a child, particularly in a remote or disconnected area?

Nutrition specialists ask: How many calories does a child need to be healthy? How few make the child moderately or severely malnourished? These types of questions, when asked about information, can allow us to define information poverty, and then assign the necessary resources (connectivity, content, access) to help a child reach their full potential.

As part of the Information Poverty initiative, we are seeking an intern to do research on how to measure and classify diversity and relevance of content – focusing on online content. The intern will explore and develop a methodology to measure timeliness, diversity, and localization of content within a specific context. The work will feed into a larger research project that is building a framework to measure Information Poverty globally.

Main tasks:

Desk and literature research on existing state of the art initiatives related to measuring relevance and diversity of content for children and youth.

Support the development of a basic content classification methodology for the Information Poverty initiative.

Duration: 10 weeksDuty Station: NYHQRead the full TOR and apply here.Purpose of the assignment: Knowing where vulnerable people and services are located is essential when development actors or governments decide where to focus resources. Unfortunately, often the most vulnerable people are located in hard-to-reach or unmapped areas, making it difficult to ensure that they have access to the most basic services.

UNICEF Innovation is exploring how satellite imagery can help us map schools or assess damage during humanitarian crises much faster than before.

Through mappathons and collaborative work, users visually inspect and assess images for a chosen challenge. Crowdsourcing techniques have been successfully implemented in the past for a variety of applications such as damage assessment during a crisis or infrastructure and facility mapping.

We are looking for a crowdsourcing mapping intern to look into existing crowdsourcing tools (i.e. Mapswipe from OSM) and identify potential use cases aligned with UNICEF Innovation’s focus areas. You will be working alongside a team of satellite imagery and data science experts.

Main tasks:

Analyse existing open source crowdsourcing products and applications

Come up with proposed strategies of how to use one of these tools for infrastructure mapping or damage assessment.

PURPOSE of the assignment: We are seeking an intern to support the UNICEF Venture Fund to develop its valuation model. How do we value open source IP? How do we value the communities we invest in? And the impact we have with open source tech solutions?

Duration:10 weeksDuty Station: NYHQRead the full TOR and apply here. Purpose of the assignment: We are seeking an intern to support the UNICEF Innovation Venture Fund in building out our work on innovation for children with disabilities.

Main tasks:

Mapping out start-ups and technology solutions for children with disabilities using new augmentative and assistive communication tools

Conducting related market research identifying major trends in technology, industry, needs and gaps

Provide logistical and substantive support to open development meeting for start-ups and entrepreneurs working on related solutions

Propose focus areas and investment strategy for the Innovation Fund

Background

UNICEF needs to be agile and adapt to the evolving challenges affecting all children — from disease outbreaks, to the global refugee crisis, to millions of out-of-school children. One thing that is consistent: the speed at which these problems disrupt the lives of children worldwide is only getting faster. To address these problems, UNICEF works with a network of global problem solvers who can find new ways to accelerate results that reduce inequities for children.

Through our network of technology companies, UNICEF Country Offices, and academic institutions, we construct pilots to quickly determine if projects should be continued or not. The Office of Innovation provides support to innovation leads in Country Offices and consists of a flat team of technologists, designers, programmers, researchers and communication specialists, working to pilot and scale new solutions for UNICEF.

The UNICEF Ventures team explores and invests in early stage solutions that show great potential to positively impact children in the 0-2 year future. We also have a small venture fund – the UNICEF Innovation Fund – which provides resources to quickly assess, fund and scale companies, teams, and ideas that have been developed in new and emerging markets. The Innovation Fund supports the generation of open source, public goods that address the most pressing challenges facing children.

Interns must fund themselves for their travel to the duty station, their accommodation and living expenses at the duty station during the internship. A monthly stipend might be considered on a monthly basis.

UNICEF accepts no responsibility for the medical insurance of the intern or costs arising from accidents and illness incurred during the internship. Interns have to demonstrate a proof of medical insurance prior to the beginning of the internship and covering the full internship period.

Interns are personally responsible for obtaining necessary visa covering the entire period of their internship.

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About This Site

This site contains a sampling of UNICEF’s Innovation initiatives, resources, media coverage, and first person posts on how UNICEF country offices are creating innovations in programme, process, partnership and product.